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Updated: September 15, 2025
Substance, Pneuma, and Form being all evolved out of the primordial chaotic mass, this material world as it lies before us came into existence." And being both Solitary and Indeterminate it tells us nothing determinate about itself. Chuang Tzu's Super-tao
The old philosopher had so just a suspicion of the real state of affairs that you could make use of his language in many cases, if you substituted the word "oxygen," which we now-a-days use, for the word 'pneuma'. Then he imagined that the blood, further concocted or altered by contact with the 'pneuma', passed to a certain extent to the left side of the heart.
There is a very modern flavor to his oft-quoted expression that the best physician was the man who was able to distinguish between the possible and the impossible. Erasistratus elaborated the view of the pneuma, one form of which he believed came from the inspired air, and passed to the left side of the heart and to the arteries of the body.
The basic principle of life, in the Galenic physiology, is a spirit, anima or pneuma, drawn from the general world-soul in the act of respiration. Here it will be best to leave it for a moment and trace the vascular system along a different route.
I could never make them understand that the only reason for the Roman Christians making the sign of the Cross from left to right, while the Greeks make it from right to left, is that we say 'spiritus sancti', while they say 'agion pneuma'. "If you said pneuma agion," I used to say, "then you would cross yourself like us, and if we said sancti spiritus we should cross ourselves like you."
For even Paul conceived of Jesus as a man wholly exceptional in spiritual character; or, in the phraseology of the time, as consisting to a larger extent of pneuma than any man who had lived before him. The question was sure to arise, Whence came this pneuma or spiritual quality? Whether the question ever distinctly presented itself to Paul's mind cannot be determined. Probably it did not.
The word soul corresponds to the Latin anima, to the Greek +pneuma+, to the term of which all nations have made use to express what they did not understand any better than we do. In the proper and literal sense of the Latin and the languages derived from Latin, it signifies that which animates.
We may trace to one of them, Anaximenes, who regarded air as the primary principle, the doctrine of the "pneuma," or the breath of life the psychic force which animates the body and leaves it at death "Our soul being air, holds us together."
We have the same thing in the "pneuma" of the stoics and in the "pneuma agion" of the primitive Christians, the sacred energy, the vivifying force, which is the concentrated essence of all the souls. It is what Origen speaks of as "universum mundum velut animal quoddam immensum." We encounter the idea once more in the fertile fancies of Cardanus, Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and Campanella.
If pneuma, in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification with the Word.
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